Roswell, UFOs and the Unusual

Mogul Flight No. 4

As many of you know, I have been arguing against the Project Mogul explanation for what fell at Roswell from the moment that it was first proposed. I have never believed that it adequately explained the debris, descriptions of the field where it allegedly fell, or all of the witness testimony. When we cherry-pick what we want, then Mogul can be viewed as acceptable but, when we remember the words of Charles Moore, one of those associated with the project, we see its failure. Moore said that the balloons would not have gouged the terrain, and if there was a gouge, then Mogul is not the answer (and no, I’m not going to go through the eyewitnesses who talked of a gouge here).

We know what Sheridan Cavitt had to say about it because it is repeated as gospel. Those who champion his testimony have forgotten that Cavitt lied about his whereabouts in 1947, lied about his assignment, said that he never went on any balloon recovery and then, in 1995, changed all that. He was there and recognized the material as balloon remnants immediately. He could not explain why he hadn’t mentioned this to either Major Jesse Marcel or to Colonel William Blanchard.

And even after he had told the Air Force investigators that he recognized it as a balloon, he still told me that he hadn’t gone out to the site. He was at a loss as to why both Marcel, and Cavitt’s own NCOIC, Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett would say that he had.

But the balloon explanation has held because of those who wish to believe that Roswell is easily explainable. It may be many things, but it is not so easily dismissed.

So, why bring this up now… and again. Well, I think an examination of Dr. Albert Crary’s diary, which provides us with the only record for Mogul Flight No. 4, the culprit identified by so many, needs to be examined carefully. By doing so, I believe that Mogul is eliminated from the list of candidates.

First, let me point out that Charles Moore prepared detailed report on Project Mogul Flight No. 4 using his expertise and winds aloft data that I supplied to him. As I have mentioned before, that data only went to 20,000 feet and it was often incomplete with several stations either not reporting or reporting only partial data. Even the layman, looking at these data see that the winds are wildly variable and often blowing in nearly opposite directions from one altitude to the next.

Second, let’s look at what Crary wrote about those early June, 1947, launches that included Fight No. 4. He said, “June 4, 1947. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds. Flew regular sonobuoy up in cluster of balloons and had good luck on receiver on ground but poor on plane. Out with Thompson pm. Shot charges from 1800 to 2400.”

So we have contradictory accounts here in the only documented source. Charles Moore, wrote:

“Crary’s diary entries for June 4 are puzzling because they are contradictory. My examination of his original handwritten entries suggests that he copied from other notes; the entries from June 2 through the first half of June 5 appear to have been written in one sitting with the same pencil and without any corrections or false starts. During the hectic operations in June, he apparently used field notes to record events as they occurred and then transcribed them later into his diary. This is evident in some later entries where the events of an entire week were lumped together…One interpretation of the June 4 entry is that the launch scheduled for making airborne measurements on Crary’s surface explosions after midnight was canceled because of clouds but, after the sky cleared around dawn, the cluster of already-inflated balloons was released, later than planned. The initial cancellation and later launch were recorded sequentially, as they occurred, in his field notes which he later transcribed into his permanent diary without elaboration.”

And another interpretation, based on earlier entries is that there was no flight No. 4. Crary’s diary for the trip to New Mexico notes on June 3, “Up at 2:30 AM ready to fly balloons but finally abandoned due to cloudy skies. I went out to Tularosa Range and fired charges from 6 on to 12. Missed 5:30 shot — trouble getting ordnance men.”

On June 4, “He wrote that there was no balloon flight…”

That seems to eliminate Flight No. 4. It is not recorded in the final documents associated with Project Mogul. Remember, Moore himself noted that Crary had copied over his field notes in one sitting so there is the distinct possibility that he copied them incorrectly so that we have an impression that there was a later flight of balloons on June 4 which would have been Flight No. 4. But we have no real record of it. Instead we have Flight No. 5 the next morning, the first of the recorded New Mexican flights. Something else the skeptics fail to mention.

Instead, we’re treated to Moore’s (at the time of the report) fifty-yearold memories. We are cautioned by the skeptics to be dubious of these long ago memories but, of course, they accept Moore’s as reliable. Moore wrote:

I have a memory of J. R. Smith watching the June 4^th cluster through a theodolite on a clear, sunny morning and that Capt. Dyvad reported that the Watson Lab radar had lost the targets while Smith had then in view. It is also my recollection that the cluster was tracked about 75 miles from Alamogordo by the crew in the B-17. As I remember this flight, the B-17 crew terminated their chase, while the balloons were still airborne (and J.R. was still watching them), in the vicinity of Capitan Peak, Arabela and Bluewater, NM. I, as an Easterner, had never heard of these exotically-named places but their names have forever been stuck in my memory. This flight provided the only connection that I have ever had with these places. From the note in Crary’s diary, the reason for termination of the chase was due to poor reception of the telemetered acoustic information by the received aboard the plane. We never recovered this flight and, because of the sonobouy, the flight gear and the balloons were all expendable equipment, we had no further concern about them but began preparations for the next flight.

Moore, as have so many other skeptics, quotes the Brazel description of the debris he found that appeared in the newspaper. “When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches think, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 to 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.”

But Moore, as like all the other skeptics before him, fails to report that Brazel said that he had found weather observation devices before but this was nothing like them. But if it was Mogul, then it would have been recognizable as a weather observation device because Mogul was made up of regular weather observation devices. So what was so strange about it that it induced Brazel to drive into Roswell to report it? Why did the military then wish to accompany him back out to the ranch to see where it was found? And if it only weighed five pounds, what is all that other stuff that was supposedly scattered in the high desert around the ranch?

And here is something else that the skeptics fail to report. Moore told me that he and a couple of the others on the Mogul team went to Roswell to ask for their help in tracking their balloons. The officers at Roswell didn’t have the time to deal with “college boys.” This means, of course, that the officers at Roswell knew about Mogul and what it would be like.

Further, because they were launching balloon arrays that could foul up air traffic in southern New Mexico, they were required to post a notice to airman (NOTAM) about the launches. So, while the purpose of Mogul was a secret, they fact that balloon arrays were being launched in southern New Mexico was not.

The point here is that Mogul just doesn’t make a very good solution for the case. The facts don’t add up and the skeptics tend to forget those parts that point in another direction. They can’t even prove there was a Flight No. 4, and if there wasn’t, then Mogul explains nothing. It merely clouds the issue, as so much else has.

Moore Knew of Mogul

Some things just never change. We have been bombarded for years by the idea that Project Mogul was so highly classified that even the men who worked on it didn’t know the name. I’ve argued that while the purpose was classified, the equipment wasn’t so the men at Roswell should have been able to identify for what it was, that is, weather balloons and radar targets. And now I learn that some of these assumptions simply aren’t true.

In Karl Pflock’s anti-Roswell book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, we learn, on page 145, that Charles Moore (seen here), one of the project engineers, didn’t even know the name of the project until 1992 when Robert Todd told him. It makes it sound as if Mogul was quite important and that it was so highly classified that it’s not surprising that the officers and men at Roswell didn’t know a thing about it.

I have reported, in the past, that Moore told me that he, along with a couple of others traveled from Alamogordo to Roswell to ask for assistance in tracking the balloon arrays. This would mean that there were officers and men at Roswell who did know about the project and what it was. And given the way the military works, at least one of those officers would have also been involved in the recovery on the Foster (Brazel) ranch and would have identified it.

And even if that wasn’t true, we also know that the Mogul people were required to issue NOTAMs, that is, Notices to Airmen, about the launches so that had this been what had been found, one of the men, probably the operations officer, would have suggested that the debris was actually one of these balloons, had it been.

Now we have even more evidence about this.

Writing on Errol Bruce Knapp’s UFO UpDates, Brad Sparks tells us that Moore knew the name of the project long before Robert Todd told him what it was. Sparks gives us a look at a letter that was written in 1949, which was unclassified and which mentions Project Mogul by name. So, even the name of the Project was not classified.

The letter can be found at: http://roswellproof.com/McLaughlin_Van_Allen_letter.html

In the letter, dated May 12, 1949, Robert B. McLaughlin is describing, for James A. Van Allen (seen here), that C. B. Moore, yes, our Charles Moore, who he was. He then writes, “In addition to this, he had been head of Project Mogul for the Air Force.”

I suppose you could say that Moore was unaware of the letter but according to Brad Sparks, Moore had received a courtesy copy and the copy that Sparks reproduced came from Moore’s own files. So, it would seem that Moore knew the name long before Robert Todd told him what it was.

Even more impressive, are the diary notes written by Dr. Albert Crary (seen here), chief of the project and reproduced by the Air Force in their massive The Roswell Report released in 1995. In Section 17, Journal Transcripts, Albert P. Crary, April 2 1946 — May 8, 1946 and December 2, 1946 — August 16, 1947, we can see that on December 11, 1946… “Equipment from Johns Hopkins Unicersity (sic)transferred to MOGUL plane…”

On December 12, Crary noted, “C-54 unloaded warhead material first then all MOGUL eqpt (sic) which went to North Hangar.”

I’ve seen Jesse Marcel, Sr., the air intelligence officer at Roswell called a liar and worse over just these sorts of things. We can now document that Moore knew the name even as he insisted that neither he nor any of the others knew it in 1947. Clearly that statement is not accurate.

What we learn from all this is that even the name wasn’t all that important. While the ultimate purpose might have been classified, it is quite clear that not even the name was. Crary puts in it his diary and then McLaughlin writes about it in an unclassified letter, of which Moore has a copy.

So, once again, we can ask the question… How is it that these balloons, which were not classified, in a project with an unclassified name, could be mistaken for something extraterrestrial? The simple answer is, “They couldn’t.”

And now we have more evidence that the situation in 1947 is not what we have been told by the Air Force and others. That makes Mogul and even less likely answer.

Lies and Moore Lies

Let the firestorm begin.

Yes, I have grown tired of the double standard applied to Roswell witnesses by nearly everyone. If the witness says what you want to hear, then he, or she, is believed. If not, then the smear begins.

Every little slip is suddenly a false claim or a lie or a slander, and the person is attacked, vilified, and left for dead. It doesn’t matter if the attack is accurate or invented, just as long as it is nasty.

I suggested that we cut Major Jesse Marcel, Sr. some slack because what he said in an interview with Bob Pratt didn’t conform, per-fectly, to what his military records said. There are those who suggest that Marcel engaged in nothing more outrageous than a little resume inflation. Others said that this proved he was nothing more than a despicable liar and if he told you the sky was blue, you had better go out to look.

What it really boils down to is that Marcel apparently told Pratt he had some advanced education and the records only seemed to bear out about a year and a half with no degree. The Pratt interview suggested Marcel said that he had a degree, or so it seems, but the transcript provided is a little garbled and the tape no longer exists. Attempts to verify an advanced degree for Marcel have failed.

I thought we could all agree that Marcel was who he said he was, that is, the Air Intelligence Officer of the 509^th Bomb Group because the records proved that. We could see that he was respected by his superiors and that the “mistake” over the weather balloon had not damaged his career. When discussing the relevant portions of the Roswell case, Marcel hadn’t told any lies. He might not have told everything he knew, but he wasn’t lying.

I suggested that we could show that Charles Moore, of Project Mogul fame, had engaged in a little of the same thing, that is, what he said wasn’t reflected by the record. He had told people that he didn’t know the name of Mogul until Robert Todd told him. The record showed that the Mogul name was known to the participants in the project as early as 1946. A slip of the tongue or a lapse of memory. I wasn’t going to call him a liar over that.

It turns out that this wasn’t really a lapse of memory because I now have the full story on the letter Moore sent to Dr. James van Allen. Moore, according to Brad Sparks, reviewed his files for James McDonald, and pulled out the letter. According to the annotations on it, Moore reviewed that letter in 1969. He was explaining who the Bob who signed the letter was, meaning R. B. McLaughlin. Moore clearly knew that he was being described as the chief engineer for Project Mogul.

To me, this is just as egregious as Marcel talking about his college education. If you are going to reject one, then you must reject the other. To do otherwise is to employ a double standard.

It does get worse for Moore, however. In 1995, he attacked the veracity of Frank Kaufmann, claiming that Kaufmann was lying because there was only a single SCR-270 radar at White Sands in 1947. It had, according to Moore, a range of only 39.7 miles (I really like these precise numbers because they have the ring of authenticity to them when you’re inventing details.)

But here’s what I know. In December 1941, the SCR-270 radar detected the Japanese attack force at 130 miles from Pearl Harbor. The operators there thought that it was a flight of incoming B-17s they had been told would be landing on that Sunday morning. The point is that they detected the enemy at more than 39.7 miles.

In fact, the radar could detect aircraft at more than 100 miles if they were flying high enough. According to the information I have, if the target is at one thousand feet, the radar would spot it about 20 miles away; at 5000 feet, it would detect the aircraft at 50 miles; and at 25,000 feet it would detect the aircraft at more than 100 miles. We have to assume that Moore just invented the 39.7 mile range as he wrote about Kaufmann or he wouldn’t have come up with the 39.7 mile figure, which is ridiculous, but certainly looks impressive.

However, in 1994, in his interview with Air Force investigators about the Roswell case, Moore mentioned the multiple radars that were at either White Sands or Alamogordo. So he knew the truth a year before he went after Kaufmann.

Brad Sparks tells me that he has copies of July 1947 teletype messages from Moguls AAF liaison group and the AMC Watson Labs that routinely report on V-2 launches where there were four radars listed at White Sands, including two, not one, SCR-270s, and that two of the radars, the CPS-4 and the CPS-5 tracked the V-2s up to a hundred miles.

To make it worse, according to a 1948 paper written by Moore, he tells us that they tracked the Mogul balloons up to 65 miles with the radar, not just to 39.7 miles that he claimed was the range of the SCR-270. And we know, that they could track the balloons to 110 miles if they were above 25,000 feet.

What all this tells me is that Moore had a vendetta against the military and the Army at Roswell, and I suspect it began when the Army refused to help them with their balloon experiments. I say this with confidence because I listened to him complain about the Army being too busy to help the “college boys” with their weather balloons. College boys was his term, not mine. After nearly 50 years, he was still annoyed with them and saw this as a way of payback. Make them look like idiots because they couldn’t tell the difference between an alien spacecraft and basic weather balloons with rawin radar targets. My point here, however, is if we’re not going to cut some slack for Jesse Marcel, then I see no reason to cut any for Moore. It is clear that Moore wanted to attack the credibility of the Army and used this to do it. And this attitude calls into question all his work with the winds aloft data proving, in his mind, that one of their balloon got to within 17 miles of the Brazel ranch… never mind that he couldn’t prove there was Flight No. 4 to leave the debris, and forget that Crary’s diary said the first flight in New Mexico was number five. I think Moore knew the truth about this too but chose to obscure these facts because they didn’t fit into his agenda.

While I am sympathetic to Moore because of his current health problems, that doesn’t change the facts. He has been misrepresenting various aspects of the Roswell case from the moment he learned about it. And if Marcel doesn’t deserve some consideration, then neither does Moore.

As an aside, and as Brad Sparks mentioned, this doesn’t change the fact that Frank Kaufmann was inventing his role in the Roswell case. You can’t reject him because of his claims about the radars… but you certainly can because of the many other aspects of his tale. And if you are confused, I will say this. I still believe that we must reject Kaufmann because of all the other lies he told about his military service and the Roswell crash.

Another Dust Up

Well, it’s happened again and I find myself in the middle of a controversy that I seemed to have started but didn’t mean too… well, not completely. I did send out the original question, but I thought the tone of my missive was reasoned and restrained but some of the responses have been, shall we say, overheated.

Here’s the deal. We have learned that the name of Project Mogul was not the big secret we were lead to believe. It was known to project members as evidenced by the Air Force when they reprinted the notes from Dr. Albert Crary’s diary that mentioned Mogul more than once.

Brad Sparks has a copy of a letter that he got from Charles Moore (above)in which Moore is introduced to Dr. James A. van Allen (seen here) as one of the engineers for Mogul. Moore, however, said that he hadn’t even known the name until Robert Todd told him it was Mogul in 1992.

In the course of all this, I asked a couple of people if Jesse Marcel, Sr. didn’t deserve the same courtesy they were extending to Moore. Marcel had said some things that didn’t agree with the record and he was immediately labeled a liar of the first order. Moore said some things that didn’t agree with the record and it was just that he didn’t remember, or if he had heard the name, it didn’t penetrate into his stream of consciousness. He wasn’t a liar, just forgetful.

I had thought that I had made it clear that I didn’t believe Moore to be lying. I thought he had forgotten the name until reminded by Todd. If I was on the other side of the fence, or rather Moore was, I would have smeared him as a liar and the proof was in the documentation. In UFO research there is no room for mistakes. Everything is a lie or a fraud, a slander, or some other crime.

Anyway, I didn’t really think Moore lied about this, though I do believe his memory is colored by the reception he and his fellow “college boys” received when they traveled to Roswell to solicit the help of the Army. Payback is a bitch.

I also suggested that Todd had received the entirety of Marcel’s service record illegally because there were things in it, sure as his evaluations that aren’t part of the public record, and are should not be released under FOIA. I pointed out that the Privacy Act trumped FOIA.

And I had suggested that Karl Pflock (above) had interpreted the transcript of the Bob Pratt with Jesse Marcel (below) interview one way, but that it could be interpreted in others. The changing of a comma in one sentence, for example, changed the meaning.

There were those who thought it unfair that I attack two people who were dead and one who was critically ill and couldn’t respond. I believed that their writings were still open to interpretation and was still fair game. I expect to be attacked long after I’m gone, though I do plan to live forever or die in the attempt… but I digress.

So, Todd was a vile man who respected no one who didn’t agree with him and wasn’t above writing nasty letters to let those people know what he thought of them. He believed that he was right on every point and everyone else was wrong. When he died, I posted a note to this blog acknowledging his good work and ignoring his lack of personality and his other many flaws. I make no apology for suggesting these things now and anyone who has been at the far end of a Todd attack knows what I mean.

I will point out that Americans often have a bad reputation in the rest of the world. I believe that we should be respectful in our communications with those in other countries. I thought we all should act as good will ambassadors, and if we disagreed, we could word our responses in a diplomatic fashion.

Not so Todd. He was an arrogant man who hammered at everyone who disagreed with him no matter what their location. His was not the image we should embrace when communicating with our colleagues in foreign nations.

One of his letters was so nasty that I sent an apology to the man, letting him know that not all Americans were that vulgar. Some of us could act civilized.

Todd deserves no respect, and if I offended anyone by saying the above, sorry, but it is the truth and you know it. It shouldn’t matter that he held up your end of the debate. You should recognize him for what he was.

Karl, on the other hand, was a colleague and when he died, I was asked to provide an obituary for him. We had also worked on a couple of projects together, including a suggestion that Barney Barnett hadn’t been a part of the Roswell events and his description of seeing the crashed saucer had more to do with Aztec than it did with Roswell. The only tie we could find was that of Fleck Danley, Barnett’s boss who wasn’t sure when Barnett had told him about the crash. A diary kept by Barnett’s wife seemed to eliminate July 1947 as the proper time frame.

Karl and I disagreed on a number of things, but I believed him to be intellectually honest about most, something I can’t say about Todd. Karl and I had planned another project together, but his illness prevented it.

I don’t think I said anything particularly negative about Karl, other than suggesting that his interpretation of the Pratt interview with Marcel wasn’t black and white, but shades of gray, which is the point about the comma makes.

For those who are interested, here is what I mean. Karl interpreted various unclear parts, and once again, I have pointed this out to others. Marcel was talking about having been shot down and that he bailed out. Pratt asked, "Everyone survive," and Marcel said, "All but one crashed into a mountain," which suggests that only he and one other survived. However, if I insert a comma, Marcel said, "All, but one crashed into a mountain," which could mean all survived but one who crashed into a mountain.

Here’s where we are. I believe that Charles Moore was playing a little “catch up” with the Army by suggesting that they couldn’t tell the difference between a balloon and an alien spacecraft. His thinking was colored by his treatment back in 1947. But I don’t think he was lying about anything and the discrepancies between what he said in the 1990s and the records of the 1940s say more about the human memory than it does about Moore’s truthfulness.

Todd, on the other hand, wasn’t above name calling and distortion and I can think of no reason to defend him now. His record speaks for itself and it isn’t a good one. He clearly didn’t understand interpersonal relationships and if he did, he simply didn’t care.

Karl, I count as a friend and if we disagreed on some points UFOlogical, we agreed on many more. He made mistakes in his Roswell book and I see no reason not to say that just because he’s no longer with us. We all make mistakes, we all believe people we shouldn’t and we all have our opinions colored by our own beliefs. (Yes, one of those Karl believed was the witness he named reluctant who was Walt Whitmore, Jr. who radically altered his story over time.)

So, I don’t really understand the venom directed at me about this. I don’t understand why it is necessary to resort to personal attacks rather than just state the facts. If I don’t believe in your pet case it is because, to me, the evidence isn’t as persuasive as it is to you. Doesn’t make me right or you wrong, it just means that on this point we disagree.

I have been on the receiving end of many of these attacks recently. I ignore most simply because they are borne of ignorance and mean little in the grand scheme of things. But sometimes I simply do not understand them, especially when I believe I have been fair in my assessments.

Anyway, this will suggest another side to the debate and maybe suggest that we can elevate our discourse to a civilized level. If not, well, I won’t be very surprised.

Mogul and OPSEC

You have to love the skeptics. No matter what evidence surfaces, they’ll find a way to spin it to their advantage. As many of you know, I have been suggesting for quite a while that the Project Mogul answer doesn’t work to explain the Roswell UFO crash because it just wasn’t as secret as everyone has been claiming. I mean, we’ve learned that the members of the Mogul team did know the name back in the 1940s, the equipment was bought off-the-shelf so that it did not present a new advance in balloon technology, and we know that the launches weren’t all that classified either. I’ve said as much.

Now I learn that one of the skeptics has decided that OPSEC applies to Mogul and this is the theory under which we can retreat to the idea that Mogul was the highly classified project that has been claimed.

OPSEC?

For those not familiar with the world of military secrecy, OPSEC stands for Operational Security which means that the operation, whatever it might by, has a need for security. A bomber flight from a base outside of the war zone to a target inside, has a need for OPSEC. You don’t want the enemy to know that you’re coming so that he will be ready to oppose the attack. You want to keep the details of the mission secret for the surprise.

But we need OPSEC for a balloon launch? A balloon launch which, I might add, had to be announced in the NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) so they would know that these aerial monstrosities known as balloon arrays would be floating through the New Mexico skies (or other skies as the winds and the project might dictate). A balloon launch which would have been known to the officers at the 509^thBomb Group in Roswell because the project officers had been there to tell them about it.

OPSEC has nothing to do with this. The fact that there were people in New Mexico in June and July 1947 launching huge arrays of balloons had so little need for OPSEC, that newspapers around the country carried stories about the balloons. Not the ultimate purpose mind you, but that these arrays were being launched from Alamogordo for research purposes. So much for OPSEC.

The classified part of the mission was that they were attempting to create a constant level balloon so that they could float them over the Soviet Union, or close to it, and listen for atomic detonations. This was the big secret and this was the classified purpose. I’m not sure how highly classified this might have been, but it really is the only part of the project to be classified.

But the operation in New Mexico, the launches, had no need for OPSEC. Troop movements had a need for OPSEC. Missions into enemy territory had a need for OPSEC. The Normandy Invasion had a need for OPSEC, but not the launch of a bunch of balloons in New Mexico in an experiment to see if they would stay at the same level for a long period of time.

Here’s the problem for those who believe in the Mogul answer for the Roswell events. They have to explain the extraordinary effort to recover the debris, and all the interest generated when the debris was found. Mogul seemed to be tailor-made for that. A highly classified project that was so secret that even the participants didn’t know the real name.

But all that has fallen apart. Albert Crary, the project director, knew the name in 1946, as did Charles Moore, who would claim that he didn’t learn the name until the 1990s when Robert Todd told him. But Moore was wrong on that point just as a letter in his own files proved. Forgotten the name, maybe, but he had known it in the 1940s.

We have newspaper articles from the time telling us about the project and the launches of the balloon arrays. We even have pictures of them launching the balloons in Alamogordo, which, of course, suggests that the launches weren’t all that secret. So, what do we do? We trot out OPSEC and then lecture us all on the importance of operational security.

But OPSEC is another red herring, just as the anthropomorphic dummies and the high altitude parachute tests were red herrings. Throw out enough confusing information and you’ll have hidden the truth in the blur. This is known as disinformation, and while I’m not a big fan of claiming government disinformation on the Roswell crash, it certainly is beginning to look like it. Or at a skeptical retreat into disinformation.

The latest, of course, is not a government attempt to bury the truth. Just one more skeptic who sees himself as the keeper of the flame and he who knows “The Truth.” Throw out a term, OPSEC, because it looks good and it sounds intimidating and people will think you know what you’re talking about. OPSEC, however, is not a consideration on a mission that is transparent, as we say in today’s world. The balloon launches, the arrays, and the schedules were not classified, just the ultimate purpose and to protect that, you didn’t need OPSEC.

Anthropomorphic Dummies

Since Tony opened the door again, let’s run through it. We have the Air Force’s second final report on Roswell cleverly titled Roswell — Case Closed which suggests those reporting bodies were fooled by anthropomorphic dummies (seen here in the center) dropped as tests some ten years later. When first offered, even the colonel holding the press conference seemed to have his tongue planted in his cheek. The reporters didn’t seem to be buying the explanation then and everyone seemed to be having a laugh at this ridiculous suggestion.

Fast forward ten years and now it seems that all those skeptics who didn’t buy the Air Force answer (which is not to say they bought the extraterrestrial answer either) seem to have slipped into the Air Force camp quietly. Now, we are treated to the idea that human memory is fickle and that this “time compression” explanation that was laughed at then, makes sense now.

Well, I’m not going to argue that point because people do confuse events, people do confabulate and some of them just tell lies to thrust themselves into the public spotlight. We don’t have to look far to find them. People claim high military rank to bolster their credibility. They claim to have participated in events that they did not. They claim all sorts of things. And sometimes they just get confused about a sequence of events or the time frame for them with no malice in mind.

But with the Air Force final report, we don’t have to worry about time compression and confusion because we’re stuck with lies. Oh, not from the Air Force officers interviewed because they related what they were doing while working on various projects accurately. We can argue interpretation here, but again that’s not the point. If you want to read a fascinating history of the Air Force Project High Dive, this is the place to do it.

No, I’m going to argue about the witnesses to alien bodies quoted to support the Air Force idea of these people seeing anthropomorphic dummies.

Here’s the rub, of those cited in the report, Gerald Anderson, Glenn Dennis (seen here), and Jim Ragsdale, none was involved. Each told an interesting story, but those stories have been discredited. And of those three, Dennis was only relating what had supposedly been told to him by a nurse. He hadn’t seen the bodies himself, just the drawing the nurse made which seems to reflect the Martians from the 1953 War of the Worldsmovie, at least in part.

The final two quoted, Vern Maltais and Alice Knight were reporting, accurately I’m sure, what Barney Barnett told them about seeing the alien creatures. It’s clear, however, that Barnett’s tale had little or nothing to do with the 1947 UFO crash. They could only tell us what Barnett had told them.

So, the question becomes, why would the Air Force give any credence to these reports? Why not just say that the stories told were without foundation and let it go at that? Why come out with this idea that anthropomorphic dummies, which looked like what they were and not alien creatures, stand? And finally, how good can your conclusions be if you’ve built your foundation on a phony base?

Here is the conundrum for the Air Force. They wanted to attack the idea that there were bodies so they took testimony from civilians who claimed involvement but who, by the time the Air Force started looking at this, had been exposed.

To make it worse, if possible, they explained Frank Kaufmann’s illustration of what the craft looked like by publishing a picture of “tethered ‘Vee’ balloon” (see previous page) that was taken in 1965, or nearly twenty years after the fact. The problem here is that Kaufmann was making up most of what he said about the construction of the craft so their explanation fails on that point.

The question then is, how does the testimony of those people support the idea of anthropomorphic dummies? If we conclude that these people were in error, in the case of Maltais and Knight, or were inventing their involvement as did Anderson, Dennis and Ragsdale, then isn’t the argument for anthropomorphic dummies eliminated?

And doesn’t all this argue that the Air Force didn’t care for the truth as long as they could confuse the issue in the minds of those who haven’t been paying close attention and keeping score at home? They can say, “Well these people really saw anthropomorphic dummies,” when the fact is, they didn’t see anything at all. Any descriptions they offered, if it matched the dummies was purely coincidental. That doesn’t help their case.

Finally, the Air Force stayed away from attacking the testimony of any of the high ranking officers. They were just left out of the mix. I suspect they didn’t want to be calling an Air Force general and a bunch of colonels liars. Use the civilians but don’t mention the Air Force officers.

True, Edwin Easley (seen here) didn’t describe for me alien bodies but he did say things to family members. Patrick Saunders (seen below) didn’t mention bodies but did talk of hiding information and suggested aliens to his family. Arthur Exon talked of alien bodies based on information he received from those he knew and trusted.

All this is, of course, now second hand, but the Air Force said nothing about any of these men, didn’t quote anything they said, and pretended they didn’t exist. I’m willing to bet the Air Force might have been afraid that if they attacked the reputations of these men there might have been trouble. Suppose they sued the Air Force for publicly damaging their reputations. Such a court fight would be big news, if only for the topic, and the Air Force would have been required to prove the men were lying… which opens the door to subpoenas and court testimony. That could have gotten ugly in minutes.

Or, they just didn’t want to suggest that they would promote men to high rank who believed they had seen alien bodies or who supported the idea of alien visitation.

Anyway you look at it, the Air Force could have found itself with a nasty, public fight as it tried to prove the men liars or worse and the men demanding information through discovery. The Air Force would have been forced to produce documents or produce evidence that the men were lying. Either way, the Air Force loses.

With the anthropomorphic dummies, the Air Force supplies an answer for questions about alien bodies and they don’t have to go after the Air Force officers. The civilians just made a mistake about the bodies (though Ragsdale talked about 15 bodies, Anderson talked about one of the creatures walking around, and Dennis merely reproduced what the nurse had told him about the bodies… though I don’t believe the Air Force mentioned multiple anthropomorphic bodies being dropped which would render their explanation inadequate, but I digress). And, as an added bonus, they don’t have to label anyone a liar who might turn around and sue them. They were just mistaken in their interpretation of what they had seen. Neat.

Anyone who thinks through this is going to realize that the Air Force explanation is a crock… and if this explanation can’t be believed, then what is the Air Force hiding. If the truth is that nothing extraterrestrial fell at Roswell, then why would the Air Force care what we all think? Why not just ignore the problem because it doesn’t impact them at all… unless there is more to it than meets the eye.